Simba Technologies' CEO Corner

Tutorial on using Excel Pivot Tables with Oracle OLAP Option

There are a lot of people who currently use the Excel Spreadsheet Add-in for Oracle OLAP 10g cubes. Moving to Oracle OLAP 11g cubes, the spreadsheet add-in has been replaced by the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP. If you need to learn how to use the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP with Excel spreadsheets, Oracle has now come up with a nice tutorial that covers "how to use Excel 2007 with Oracle11g OLAP data for easy and powerful ad hoc query and analysis": http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/11gr2_db_prod/bidw/olap11g_excel/olap_excel.htm#s8.

Oracle OLAP Newsletter - January 2010

I just got the Oracle OLAP Newsletter for January 2010 and we got a nice write-up on Simba's MDX solution for Oracle OLAP 11g.  The University of Applied Sciences in Wildau, Germany has a Masters course in Data Warehousing.  They use Oracle OLAP in this course and the students used Simba's MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP in their course work. They were able to connect from Excel spreadsheets to their OLAP cubes.  You can read more about it on the Oracle website: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/olap/olapref/newsletter/oracleolapnewsletter_jan10.html.

Oracle Exadata

Over the last year, we have been doing a fair bit of work with Oracle 11g OLAP Option and the MDX query language.  Although I have not had access to an Exadata machine for testing, people tell me that OLAP runs very well on the database machine and our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP allows Excel to connect to OLAP on the database machine.  In doing more research on the database machine, I re-read an article by Stephen Swoyer from October this year that I thought might be of interest to others who are curious about the Data Warehousing space and Exadata in particular.  You can find the article at: http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=9628.  Worth a quick read.  I expect that there will be more Exadata reference customers in 2010.

Happy New Year to everyone and wish you all a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2010.

Also, if anyone is interested, Vancouver and Whistler will be hosting the Winter Olympics from February 12 to 28, 2010.  It will be quite an event.  If you want more information, please visit http://www.vancouver2010.com.  If you are planning on visiting, please give me a heads up.

XMLA for Oracle OLAP 11g

Now that our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP 11g is released, the team has been working on the next version. The released product supports the MDX query language and the ODBO COM interface.  We now have a proof of concept of an XMLA provider in house.  If anyone is interested in trying this out, give me a shout and we can discuss.

Cool title... "Peace in Our OLAP Time"

Mike Vizard at CTOEdge wrote a nice piece about what Simba has done for Oracle OLAP by adding MDX query language support and I thought I would mention it here: http://www.ctoedge.com/content/peace-our-olap-time.  Mike is quite right when he says "For an IT organization, the alliance between Oracle and Simba creates a way to develop an OLAP application using MDX without ultimately having to worry about whether the OLAP engine of one of the major database vendors in the market will support that application."

With version 1 of our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP, we have really promoted Microsoft Excel as a BI/analytics client for Oracle OLAP cubes.  Ultimately, we intend to provide a solid MDX query language interface to Oracle OLAP so that any MDX compliant front end can connect to Oracle OLAP cubes.  There is a lot of data stored in Oracle and we want to open that up to dimensional analysis.  Think about all the creative people in an organization who could do so much more if they just had access to the data for analysis purposes.  Our solution frees the data for analysis.  That it really cool!

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 and MDX for Oracle 11g OLAP Option

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 was quite busy for me.  We jointly with Oracle launched our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP and there was great interest.  I will write more about that later.

Larry Ellison's keynote was interesting as always.  This year, his major rant was against IBM.  Larry is offering a $10,000,000 reward to anyone that can make a Oracle database run at least half as fast on an IBM computer as it does on Sun's fastest computer.  Larry did also show off the Fusion apps which looked very nice.  These are expected to be available in early 2010.

We launched our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP on Monday, October 12th. We put out a joint press release with Oracle: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/036550.  We also had a session at the end of the day to show off the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP and Excel connecting to Oracle OLAP. It was a fun session to do because people were quite excited to see what we had.  Attendance was quite good - we had over 70 people - considering we were at the end of the day and competing with the OTN party.  In the session, people found it interesting that we were not using a spreadsheet add-in because that is how everyone else connects to Excel.  People were quite impressed with the BI and charting features of Excel as well as how easily you could pull PivotCharts into PowerPoint and have them dynamically update.

We also demoed the MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP at the Oracle DEMOgrounds.  Thanks to Bud Endress, Marty Gubar, and Jameson White who did a great job showing everyone what you can now do with Excel and OLAP Option. We were demoing in 2 pods and we had good traffic all throughout the show.  One person who came by explained that up till now, their users pull the data from OLAP into Microsoft Access and from there into Excel.  This, of course, loses all the dimensional characteristics of the data but it shows you how much people want to get data into Excel.  I also had people asking me if this works with other dimensionally aware BI products and the answer is "we are working on that".  In fact, we are making good progress on that front.  We even demoed SAP BusinessObjects Voyager to an Oracle OLAP customer this summer even before we had released version 1 of the product.  The SAP guys involved couldn't believe how easily we connected to Oracle OLAP.

Now I can finally say that the MDX Query Language is a widely used standard that is supported by every major OLAP cube product!

The new efficiency/normal according to Steve Ballmer

I was reading Steve Ballmer's latest email entitled "The New Efficiency" (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2009/09-29NewEfficiency.mspx) in which he basically says the new normal in business is that "people borrow less, save more, and spend with much greater caution."  This is a simple yet powerful premise to do more with less.  At Simba, we have always tried to help our customers do more with less.  Simba started out helping ISVs deliver custom ODBC and JDBC drivers to their customers to increase value.  With our ODBC and JDBC SDKs, our ISV customers were able to quickly and efficiently build open standards based data connectivity for their databases which then gave their customers tremendous advantage in they could now use a wide variety of applications with these databases.  Then, Simba broadened what we did by also adding an OLAP SDK that supports ODBO and XMLA.  Today, Simba is going a step further.  We are now adding value directly for enterprise customers.  Our new MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP lets any user of Oracle OLAP connect to their data directly from Microsoft Excel.  The user gets to leverage all the power of Excel and Oracle OLAP without having to either use an Excel spreadsheet add-in which requires learning new software or a separate mid-tier server which can be quite expensive and take time to install and configure.

SAP Improves Universe-Based Access To BW via MDX

According to a blog posting by Thomas Zurek at SAP (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/13566%3Fpage%3Dlast%26x-maxdepth%3D0), accessing BW via OLAP Universes "has now been optimized and streamlined in order to improve the interoperability."  It sounds like SAP has extended the OLAP Data Access (ODA) component so that it is more tailored to what OLAP Universes require.  Thomas also presents some statistics that show "on average, the runtime has gone down by 30% while memory consumption has been reduced by over 50% with the used set of WebI queries."  Yet another sign that SAP is working to better integrate Business Objects applications with their NetWeaver BW data warehouse.

MDX for Oracle 11g OLAP Option

The team at Simba has been very busy working on our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP.  We had a great Beta program in the spring/summer.  We are on target for a release very soon.  One of the things we were waiting for was Oracle 11g Release 2.  This is now officially out and we are testing our MDX Provider with 11gR2.  The performance of the OLAP cubes in many cases has improved significantly and that is great news.  The first version of our MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP will support an ODBO interface and will allow you to connect from Excel 2003 and Excel 2007.  We will have a session at Oracle OpenWorld on October 12th at 5:30pm where we will demo this solution.  This is not a spreadsheet add-in like what Oracle had in 10g.  Rather, our solution is an MDX Provider so technically any MDX compliant analysis tool will be able to connect to Oracle OLAP.  Version 1 of the MDX Provider is being extensively tested with Excel as there is no spreadsheet add-in for 11g OLAP and many of our Beta customers were quite keen to connect Excel to 11g OLAP.

New BI Features in Excel 2010

The Technical Preview for Office 2010 is now out and there are a lot of new BI related features in Excel.  On his blog, Chris Webb has a post describing these at: http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7B84B0F2C239489A!4645.entry.  Worth looking at.  At Simba, we are looking at how Excel 2010 will work with SAP BW and Oracle OLAP.  When possible, I will blog more about this.